Transformers: The Ultimate Guide

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He's bigger, faster and stronger too, He's the first member of the DK crew!

Transformers: The Ultimate Guide is an officially licensed guide from DK Publishing published in 2005. written by Simon Furman in 2004. In 2007, a second edition was published, increasing the page count from 144 to 152 (visibly different by having a reflective background on the cover instead of white).

Contents

Contents

Introduction

Generation One

The Ultimate Guide is one of many similarly-titled publications by Dorling Kindersley, which cover the histories, characters and worlds of comic characters such as Spider-Man, the X-Men and many others. However, the Transformers tome is distinguished by one major detail - while the other books serve as encyclopedias of the characters' long histories in print, Transformers: The Ultimate Guide gives only the most basic of treatment to the historical aspects of Generation One, and instead, its articles are focused entirely on the then-current Dreamwave comics continuity. However, as Dreamwave's universe was so monumentally underdeveloped at the time of the book's publication, most of the information in the book actually had to be created for the book.

Additionally, the book appears to deliberately favor story material from comic continuities as opposed to the cartoon continuity. This is most conspicuous in dealing with the origin of the Dinobots in the Dreamwave universe, where Furman dismisses the notion that they were built on Earth by Wheeljack (as in the cartoon) on the basis that it is in contradiction with the "historical evidence" that the Dyno-bots existed on Cybertron - from the War Within comic Furman himself wrote nearly 20 years later. This approach goes so far as to claim that the cartoon's Quintesson-creation origin for the Transformers is entirely conjectural - when talking solely about the cartoon!

Finally, in the sections where book does deal directly with historical aspects of Generation One (in the pages covering the Marvel Comics, the cartoon and the toys), not one page passes without several errors. Several names are spelled incorrectly ("Teletran-1", "Carlee", "Eleta-1", "Sean Burger"), various 'toon and comic summaries have inaccuracies in them, and the toys used for images are old, ratty artefacts with peeling, misapplied stickers and various missing accessories. The episode guides for G1, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Armada are also condensed significantly into "best of" guides showcasing the finest episodes, or ones that push the story forward.